Ukrainians who flooded the streets this month to protest the dismissal of the nation’s popular defense minister came out with their little children and pets. The atmosphere was more akin to a music festival than an antigovernment rally in the middle of a war.
Event Context
Ukraine’s independent media played an important role in the controversy by publishing reports that documented extrajudicial killings and torture of recruits in Skelya, an assault regiment that was among Syrskiy’s favored units. The commander of Skelya since has been suspended pending an investigation. Another officer, who served as Skelya’s chief of staff before assuming command of Ukraine’s 155th brigade, was arrested this month on charges of ordering his troops to kidnap and murder two Ukrainian men who had a disagreement with his wife. He denied the accusation.
Zelensky picked the replacement for Syrskiy after days of consultations with dozens of senior Ukrainian military commanders. He chose a 43-year-old officer, Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatiy, who has been repeatedly praised by Fedorov—and who had earned three reprimands from Syrskiy.
Player Focus
“Ukraine has arguably the most highly mobilized civil society anywhere in Europe today, in terms of the willingness to stand up for what they believe in, and to challenge their leaders,” said Geoffrey Pyatt, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine during the 2014 Maidan revolution, and as an assistant secretary of state in the Biden administration. “This has now been hardwired into Ukraine’s political culture.”
The tradition goes back to the common heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to which most of the country belonged for centuries, said prominent Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, a professor at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Leaders of the autonomous Cossack state that existed in Ukraine in the 17th century were by tradition smeared in mud and dirt on assuming power, as a sign that they weren’t inherently superior to those they would rule.
“What distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians is not language or religion, though there is a difference there,” Hrytsak said. “The real difference is political culture: In Ukraine, the state is not sacralized, and therefore a Ukrainian Putin or a Ukrainian Stalin is impossible. Ukrainian society is skeptical. It never trusted the state, and rarely loved even those whom it elected to power.”
Team Analysis
Within days, he yielded to perhaps the most significant of the protesters’ demands, firing the country’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, who was widely criticized for sticking to old-school Soviet ways and hampering change. He then named a new, young and popular defense chief.
Zelensky exhibited the same pattern of behavior a year earlier, when street protests led him to reverse legislation that limited the independence of anticorruption prosecutors and courts. These independent prosecutors since have indicted Zelensky’s powerful chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who has been dismissed, and other close associates on corruption charges. Yermak has denied the charges.
“The authorities here must listen to the people,” said opposition lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a frequent critic of Zelensky. “Any Ukrainian president—including Zelensky—can attempt to build his autocratic system only until the moment when society comes out on the street and says: We don’t like it. And then, there is nothing that can be done anymore. This is how it is, historically. It’s in Ukrainian blood.”
This month’s protests, and Zelensky’s partial climbdown, were laughed off in the Russian media as a sign of Ukrainian weakness and disarray, proof that the Ukrainian state is crumbling under wartime pressure. Only a few Russian military analysts noted that it took a military uprising by warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023 to replace Russia’s defense minister, while defense chief Gen. Valery Gerasimov, 70 years old, remains in place despite the many failures of the Russian war effort.
“Many, if not most, Russians are looking at the protests in Ukraine with jealousy,” said Russian political analyst Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Russian President Vladimir Putin. “At a time when Russia is turning more and more repressive, it turns out you can go out and demonstrate, and you won’t be immediately jailed or hit on the head.”
While Ukraine’s political system has a feedback loop that permits the correction of mistakes made by Zelensky, the entire Russian state machine, with its mighty intelligence and analysis apparatus, has been reduced to endorsing Putin’s decisions, he added. “The only thing anyone can do now is to approve, and all the decisions are being made by the cockroaches roaming inside the head of one aging man who has lost connection with reality,” Gallyamov said.
It is precisely this social involvement and flexibility, on all levels of power and inside the military, that has allowed Ukraine to survive 4½ years of attritional war against its giant neighbor. The nation’s allergy to authoritarian rule has persisted despite wartime restrictions, which include the postponement of presidential and parliamentary elections that, absent a war, were due to be held in 2024.
Indeed, while Putin has been in power since 1999, no Ukrainian president has won re-election this century. The only one of the six since independence in 1991 who dared to use force against protesters, Viktor Yanukovych during the Maidan revolution in 2013-2014, ultimately was ousted and fled to exile in Russia.
In Ukraine’s past, refusal to acknowledge central authority has led to infighting and anarchy that brought the country under foreign domination. That history helps explain why the protesters this month, and last year, were careful in modulating their demands so as not to accidentally overthrow Zelensky himself, something that would have unleashed a major crisis and crippled the country’s ability to defend itself.
Many of the demonstrators were too young to have participated in the Maidan revolution, and—because Ukraine doesn’t draft men under 25—haven’t fought in the war against Russia. “The young people aren’t afraid, and they are the engine of our democracy,” said Nataliia Shapoval, head of the KSE Institute think tank in Kyiv.
Though smaller after the removal of Syrskiy, the protests continue. Zelensky has declined to reinstate the former defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, but has offered him instead the job of a deputy prime minister in charge of military technology. Fedorov, so far, has refused.
While reality is far more complex, the conflict is seen by many Ukrainians as a clash between a new, technology and drone-dominated, form of warfare advocated by Fedorov, 35, and the Soviet-style casualty-heavy infantry assaults for which Syrskiy, 61, has earned the unfortunate nickname of “butcher.”
Syrskiy, who was instrumental in the defense of Kyiv and the Kharkiv counteroffensives of 2022, has said that he is fully behind modern drone-centered warfare.
While Russia is still sticking with Gerasimov, it isn’t that uncommon for countries to change military commanders in the middle of a war. The U.S. removed Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, and Union Gen. George McClellan during the Civil War. Former President Barack Obama changed the commanders in Afghanistan twice in just over a year.
Rarely, however, have such actions been taken because of public protests by the society at large.
“This is unusual, but Ukraine is an unusual country,” said Eliot Cohen, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University and a former senior State Department official. “It’s fighting for its existence and taking heavy casualties, so there is nothing surprising in its people and its soldiers caring an enormous amount about who commands them.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at [email protected]
